Re:How to Start Your Blog in 2023
by colinflane on Monday February 20, 2023 @03:43PM
(#34872655)
I was pleasantly surprised to learn writing raw html is not difficult, at all. I am not doing Rocket Science, though.
As others say, static site generators introduce a layer of abstraction. I like writing in markdown too, but if I really cared to, I could write my own scripts to translate. However, I found that html does not introduce undue overhead.
I am sure I could churn out content more quickly if I were writing in markdown, but at what cost? There is a cost to writing _too_ quickly. Myself, I find I actually like a little friction.
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| on HN ]
With Obsidian and an add-on you can output html pretty quickly (even with some CSS I believe)
So from writing to publishing is a short flow.
I always wondered why browsers do not parse and understand markdown on their own, it would be so easy for thrm to implement it.
Re:How to Start Your Blog in 2023
by 0cf8612b2e1e on Monday February 20, 2023 @07:55PM
(#34875059)
Until CommonMark there were a large number of ambiguities for which there was little alignment. Base Markdown is such an anemic format that it requires extensions to be useful to more forms of writing.
Along these lines...I'm surprised the HN crowd isn't into blogging in markdown, published in a git repo. About as simple as it gets and you don't get tied to a single platform. You could key sign it to ensure authenticity for when somebody rehosts it or whatever.
I had a similar feeling about markdown but I went a different direction and wrote a little package that parses markdown with front matter into html and saves it inside an in memory SQLite database. It runs quickly enough that it can hot reload anytime you save while it watches your blog posts directory. Gives you full text search and it exposes the database directly from the package so you can basically hook it up to anything.
I’m still ironing out the kinks, but it made blogging way more pleasant for me, after trying a few other things and being unimpressed overall.
Re:How to Start Your Blog in 2023
by colinflane on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @12:04PM
(#34883544)
That sounds really cool, thanks for sharing. It may well be that I'll eventually reach, or gradually approach, a footprint with my site files that rewards putting in place some layer of tooling along these lines.
But I like to think that, when that time comes, I will be the author of that tooling. As it sounds you are. Kudos!